Sinister buffoonery dressed up as ‘standards’

THE EDITOR, Madam:

It is a disgrace that 30 – some say over 60 – Jamaica-born doctors and dentists, after six gruelling years of medical training in China, are now stranded in bureaucratic purgatory while our hospitals gasp for staff. Jamaica is short of at least 500 doctors, yet these eager professionals are told to “reapply in 2026” or wait until 2027. This seems like sinister buffoonery dressed up as ‘standards’.

For decades, our health system benefited from physicians trained in Burma, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Ghana, Hungary, India, Latin America, Nigeria, Russia, the UK, and the United States. Their children sat in our classrooms and their parents were among the most trusted doctors of our families. No one questioned their competence. Why then the sudden disdain for Jamaican youngsters graduating with Chinese degrees? Is it because they did not enter medical school with enough money or dazzling A-levels and CAPEs? Should not the output – the actual quality of their training – be what matters?

As someone who mentors sixth formers for college placement, I have long observed how talent, grit, and drive – not merely pedigree – determine who becomes excellent professionals. That perspective makes it painfully clear that what is happening to these young doctors is not about competence, but about greed-motivated gatekeeping.

This pernicious snobbery echoes the trade politics of the early 1970s, when “chartered” engineers, architects, and accountants sneered at UWI (and later UTech) graduates. It was petty then, and it is cruel now. Worse, many locally trained doctors flaunt wealth while rural clinics remain unmanned, even as these China-trained colleagues are eager to serve. Yet they are blocked by bureaucrats who prefer “tings fi tan so”.

This is cultural jostling by professionals at its most harmful. And it is Jamaica’s poor – those waiting endlessly in crowded wards, those suffering without care – who pay the price in pain, in health, and in lives.

DENNIS MINOTT, PhD